Topps' New App Lets You Trade Star Wars Cards With Anyone on Earth

Books, magazines, comics, even photographs have already all made the move to digital. And finally, 65 years after coming up with a clever way to boost gum sales, Topps is bringing its iconic trading cards into the digital world with a new Star Wars app, which lets collectors trade cards with anyone else on earth with an internet connection and an iOS device.

Officially available starting today, Topps' Star Wars: Card Trader can be exclusively downloaded for free from the iOS App Store for iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. Users will be able to collect digital versions of cards featuring characters from all of the movies and animated TV series, as well as the classic Star Wars cards that Topps released decades ago for the original trilogy. So if you weren't able to complete your card collection as a kid, you can do so now without spending thousands on eBay.

The app will also include a handful of cards with characters revealed in the first Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer, and more will be added once that film hits cinemas later this year.

Tearing — or tapping — open a fresh pack of cards to see what characters are inside it is only half the fun of collecting them. Trading away your duplicates for a card you've been desperate to find is just as enjoyable, so the Star Wars: Card Trader app lets users do that with any one else on earth using the app. With a community of users that could eventually number into the millions, and a robust global trading system, suddenly it's a lot easier to find all the cards you need to complete your collection.

According to Topps, while the Star Wars: Card Trader app will be free, not all of the card packs will be. A few digital packs will be provided at no cost every day, but others needed to be purchased using in-game credits. You start off with 25,000 but additional credits can be earned by watching ads or completing surveys, or they can be straight-up purchased from as cheap as a pound, to tens of pounds.

The cards packs also range in price depending how premium they are, and the odds of finding rarer cards. Another part of the appeal of collecting trading cards was the chance of finding a rare and valuable card in a pack that cost you just a few bucks, so how popular those premium packs will actually be with collectors remains to be seen—oh, who are we kidding? It's another way to collect Star Wars memorabilia, fans are going to eat this up. [Topps]

This article originally appeared on Toyland, Gizmodo's toys and collectibles blog